"I am a survivor."

The identity and gender questions have always intrigued me. Whether gender is a matter of soul or of externalities, it needs to be examined with a more accepting mind. I met Abhina and Simran, two transgender women, and wrote their stories.


Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 25, 2011

"I came to life among the 16,000 sperms. I am a survivor. Let me survive."
She was 20 years and struggling with her identity. Underneath her male
garb, she wore women's underclothes. It was liberating to assert her
identity. Gender is what the soul defines, not the genitals.
That's what she told herself then.
"This is one life. This is my life. I shall survive," she recalled.
Abhina Aher, 35, a transgender working in Delhi, survived the snares
of the society, and five years ago, found a Guru, who helped her
through her transition. While taking the oath in front of the leaders
of the seven gharanas of Mumbai in a community home in Byculla, she
discarded all her male stir, vowed never to wear them again and began
to learn the ways of the hijra.
As a project manager for Pehchan, a new five-year project that will
provide HIV prevention services for men who have sex with men and a
part of the HIV/AIDS Alliance, Abhina moved to Delhi a year ago from
Mumbai where she was working for the community previously.
Chandelier earrings dangling from her ears, and her eyes perfectly
lined with kohl, her hair lustrous and her clothes impeccable, she is
yet to get rid of her male organs but her soul has survived the
onslaughts of making it in a society where recognition of the third
sex still has a long way to go.
When the newspapers used the term "eunuch" to define the community
that recently lost 20 of its members to a mishap in Delhi during a
congregation, she felt angry.
"We are fighting against the usage of the term. It is demeaning," she said.
There are too many stereotypes to fight against.
"When they interact with me, they look at me with astonishment," she said.
At the airports, the discrimination is there. Everywhere else, too.
"I have to go with my male name. Sometimes, others don't want to sit
with me. They change their seats," she said. "It is unfortunate."
As the Delhi government tries to establish the issue of "kin" of the
hijras that perished in the fire, Abhina said the issue of identity
lies at the core of their community. At a community congregation in
Nandnagari in East Delhi, hijra community members were trapped inside
the community hall, and many died, and others are still recuperating
from burn injuries in the hospital.
"We have become more alert. We close doors because we don't want
homophobic people to attack us and it has happened in the past. But
that's unsafe," she said.
The government announced a compensation package of Rs. two laks for
the next of each kin of each of the victims after the mishap but they
are yet to ascertain the "closest relative" as the community members
live in communes called gharanas led by the Guru after they leave home
and their families to be reborn as a hijra. As per the UNDP, there are
16 lakh hijras in the country. The community members live in a world
of hierarchies, of bonds that are forged because at some point, they
have all felt trapped within their male bodies, and have felt the need
to free themselves of the burden of their male genitals.
Abhina was born in Mumbai in a middle class family. Her father and
mother were government employees. In the world that she was born and
named as Abhijit Aher, the dreams ended at getting a secure government
job and starting a family. It was a limited world.
At seven, Aher first crossed over. At that age, she didn't know the
world regarded gender as sacred, and something that couldn't flow into
the other.
Her mother Mangala, a folk and Kathak dancer, was like a diva to her.
She donned the ghungroos first.
Her body, she said, felt rhythmic.
"I had a natural tendency to pick up rhythm. My mother was a dancer
and my father played the instruments," she said.
For many years after that day, Abhina struggled with gender and
identity issues.
"I continued being a feminine boy," she said.
At the Marathi medium school in Dadar, she first realized she was only
interested in men. She wanted men to love her as a woman. But her
first sexual encounters were with gay men.
While in school, her mother found out about her relationship with a
neighborhood boy, her best friend, and since then her "reformation"
began.
"I was policed. I wasn't allowed to play with dolls, and my clothes
were monitored," she recalled. "I kept the appearances. I excelled in
outdoor sports. I even did horse-riding."
In college, she was still exploring her sexuality through chance
encounters with men. When she stumbled upon Bombay Dost, a queer
magazine, she knew she wasn't the only one struggling with gender and
identity questions. That's when she started working for the Humsafar
Trust. Those days, she recalled, they had a one-room office and she
operated out the office, and met more transponders.
"I continued with my sexual encounters," she said. "What nobody
understands is we want to be with a man or a bisexual person. I want a
man to love me like a woman. This isn't just about sex but beyond it.
The only men I was coming across were gay men. I appeared as a man,
too."
In Class 12, she came out to her parents. But she continued living at home.
"They had no options. I was the only child," she said.
After years of crossdressing, Abhina decided to find a Guru. At the
different NGOs she worked with, she had spent time working with the
hijra community of Malvani, where she met Shehnaz Nani. She had
already started taking hormonal pills in secret and was helped by the
community members by then.
She joined the Bulakwala Gharana and identified Shehnaz Nani as her mother.
"It was a difficult decision but I did it. If I lived in fear of my
own identity, I wouldn't be able to redeem myself," she said.
She kept going to the Guru.
"Guru, I see you as my mother but if you tell me to beg and borrow and
do sex work, I won't be able to do it," she would tell Shehnaz Nani.
"I needed a mother who would transform me from male to female," she
said."That's out tradition. A culture."
But she continued living with her mother, taking care of her.
In time, her mother reconciled to her son being different.
"She tells me you have given me the love of a son and a daughter,"
Abhina said. "I am providing for her. She is proud of me."
The biological mother and the daughter talk through the nights,
giggling as little girls would do. She inherited her mother's saris
and the ghungroos. Abhina herself is a trained Lavni and Kathak
dancer.
She went to the elders of the community, the leaders of the seven
gharanas and took her oath.
"You have to say we want to be in the mother-daughter or Guru-Chela
relationship and they ask you questions to ascertain whether you
really want to be a hijra," she said. "The Guru needs to have faith in
you. We were bonded. I had to look after the Guru. Shehnaz Nani had
200 chelas at the time. This is our method of taking care of the old
and the infirm. She can't walk now but she is looked after."
Now, Abhina has become a Guru as she is influential in the community
and has a few chelas.
"Once you have a Guru, you do tag and you are reborn. I changed my
name and started wearing three clothes like a female," she said."I was
dying to do it. But I haven't got rid of my male organs. We aren't
forced to. We do it when we are ready."
She faced issues regarding renting a house in Delhi when she first moved here.
"We have to pay extra rent. Much more than what you would pay. So, we
live together to split the high rents. We live by throwing money to
navigate a system that is so much giants us, that doesn't recognize
our sexuality like for instance, the government has announced that
Aadhaar or UIDAI cards will have transgender column. But what do we do
about the base documents like the Pan card. Mine is still in the name
of Abhijit. Passport has "others" and it makes you feel as if you are
an animal. Besides, all government departments need to recognize the
transgender as a separate entity. Without it, we have issues regarding
property rights, and everything else. With Pehchan, we are trying to
address those issues and sensitize the public. One example is the
recent mishap where the government doesn't know about the guru-chela
tradition. There are no castration facilities available. It costs so
much more to do it privately."
Next to her, Simran, another transgender co-worker, nodded.
"We are trying to build a support system. Pehchan has a huge grant and
we are trying to work in 17 states to promote the rights of the
transgender community," she said.
Her day begins early. She lives in Kalyanpuri where she has bought a house now.
"I am from the Poonawala gharana," she said. "I was born and raised in Mumbai."
When she was in Class 10, she told her father she thought she was gay.
He said I was not fit to be in his house so I left home and lived at
the Bombay Central Station for three days. A hijra community member
took fancy to me, and just when we were about to begin our first
sexual encounter, I told her I felt like her.
She took me to her house and took care of me for eight months.
"I learned dancing, worked at a dance bar in Khar, and even did some
sex work but it was painful. I detested it," she said. "My dancing
days were the best time in my life. I had many admirers. I felt wanted
and I made a lot of money, too."
But it was tough living as a hijra.
I was told to wear women's clothes and I was like "why can't I wear
men's clothes and go and work in office to avoid begging and
prostituting myself."
But then, it would have meant cheating myself, she said.
"There was a phase recently in my life where I had to do sex work to
sustain myself and then I got this job," she said. "I have adopted a
daughter. I used to be in Kamathipura and she is the child of a sex
worker who passed away. Three former sex workers take care of her. I
want her to be independent and not form a close attachment as I
wouldn't want to her to feel I did charity for her. It is difficult
adopting children but many hijras adopt children and bring them up. If
it were easier, we would have saved so many children from living on
streets."
Simran hasn't changed her sex yet. On the weekends, she spends most of
her time and money on beauty parlors.
"I like pampering myself," she said.
She faced a lot of discrimination. When she used to take the metro
from Badarpur, where she first lived in a rented accommodation, women
would vacate the seat next to her.
"I felt sad," she said. "I stopped taking the metro which only took 10
minutes to get here and started taking autos that cost me Rs. 120 one
way."
On the flights, most men ask the crew to change their seats as they
feel "uncomfortable" sitting next to a hijra, she said.
"I have been working here for the last one year and 24 days and each
time I walk in the compound, men stare at me and make vulgar comments.
I am tired of 24/7 attention," she said.
Simran hasn't changed her sex yet.
"I am waiting for the legalization of SRS," she said. "I converted to
Islam because that's how the gharanas are geared. We have Hindus too
but I can go to a mosque and pray. Islam doesn't allow for sexual
relations between two men."
For now, she is trying to give back to the community in her own way
and she is happy being what she is.
"We live like the woman that is in us. We spend a lot of money on
jewelry because that is passed on to the chelas and our adopted
children and that's how we live. With no care, with no misgivings,"
she said.
Gender, as we get it from the womb, isn't sacred. What is holy is how
you feel, she said.
"I feel like a nurturer, and I feel like a woman," Simran said.

Women from Mewat and men from Punjab

On Day 8, I went to the Ramlila Grounds to see what they call the "revolution" and I found the energy infectious. An edited version of the story appeared in the Indian Express on august 24, 2011.


Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, August 23, 2011

From the podium, a thin wiry woman thundered.
“Sailab se keh do, apni aukat mein rahe.”
Mumtaz Behan, who said she was a revolutionary from Mewat, was cheered on by the crowds at the Ramlila Ground. She was speaking on behalf of the Pasmanda Dalit Muslim community.
“Jo unpe haath rakhega, use benoor kar denge,” she hollered into the microphone. The crowds swayed, clapped, whistled.
In a blue salwar kurta, she went on, promising the support of all women in Mewat.
The women of Mewat in Haryana, hitherto known to be a backward region with low literacy levels and poor health indicators, had joined the movement. Hopes were running high. Corruption was the root cause of everything.
Mumtaz pledged the support of the poor women of Mewat in a hoarse voice.
The rain started to fall. As she descended the stairs, the two young men started to sing.
“Mera Rang de basanti chola ...”
More cheers. The speaker went on to list the wide spectrum of support Anna Hazare was enlisting. Farmers' unions, dalit organizations, muslim leaders, who invoked the holy month of Ramadan as they spoke about the movement's reach, its scope and its promise.
Shahid Bhagat Singh's nephew climbed on to the stage, which looked spartan with just a poster of Gandhi as the backdrop. The isolating symbols were done away with this time. No Bharat Mata this time.
On a little table, a miniature statue of Gandhi was placed.
With a group of Sikh men, the nephew Abhay Singh Sandhu sporting a yellow turban waved the flag. He said he was with Anna and so were the people of Punjab.
The tempo caught on. The music came on. Someone shouted into the mic “Inqualab Zindabad.”
And then, more speakers.
Being part of those who were throwing their weight behind Anna was considered the populist measure for some.
A leader was discussing the financial cost of it. Couple with that, there were logistical issues. But this was the right thing to do, he was overheard telling another man.
A Sikh man exhorted the crowds to dance. He was on the stage. Sandhu was on his side. The moment was right. In the rain, it would make for the pretty picture.
The cameras were arched.
Scribes were taking notes. The crowds were watching.
Intermission. The two singers have their moment. They start to croon.
Arvind Kejriwal climbs on to the stage. He has an announcement to make. The people craned their necks. The cameras panned.
“Salman Khurshid has called us. Should we go,” he said into the mic. “If he has called, we should go. But we won't do anything without consulting you.”
A round of applause. Then, the go-ahead.
In between, Ram Jethmalani is spotted. He met Anna.
"I told him he should live. He should carry on for the movement. If he dies, the movement will die so he needs to take care of himself," he said.
Then, Professor Yogendra Yadav, an Indian social scientist and a member of the NAC for the implementation of the RTÉ act, got on to the stage.
In 2009, when UP's chief minister Mayawati had addressed a rally from the same stage, the setting was different. The stage looked regal. Four airconditioners were blasting. There were the typical accompaniments – the elephants, the pink and the blue colors, the diamonds glittering in her ears.
The same stage, which looked so out of reach, and so made up, is now the focal point of the movement. On an elevated level, Anna sits.
Yadav began his speech.
“This is a festival of democracy,” he said.
He said it warmed his heart to see people speaking in Marathi in Delhi. It was integration.
He asked the crowd what it meant when they wore caps and t-shirts saying “I am Anna.”
He went on to explain.
“It means we are looking for Anna within us,” he said.
Outside, vendors selling Anna caps were doing brisk business. Everyone was looking for Anna within and without.
Anna was behind the stage. Sleeping.

The bondage of tradition

I had seen the dargah on my visits to the Jama Masjid but had never gone inside. On an assignment to chronicle the life of a bhishti, I finally went inside and found a water carrier. The story is about how he won't let his sons do the job that was passed down to him by his forefathers because there is no future.

An edited version of the story appeared in The Indian Express on May 8, 2011.


Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, May 6, 2011

He won't hold his sons to the promise his father elicited from him. Don't do what is not unto you, he had said.
He didn't have the heart to say no. He hadn't known better then. His forefathers lived a simple life, they never exercised choice, never unleashed that force that propels you out of the familiar - the role of a water carrier handed down to them by their ancestors.
For thirty years, Shakeel Ahmed has carried the weight of the dying tradition on his worn off shoulders. A few more years and he would be spent. His body defeated, and his bones creaking he would return to his village and rest like his father Bashir in a few years. Carrying more than 20 litters of water in a hide sack is no easy feat. During the hot months of the summer, he goes up and down offering water to the pious who came to offer prayers at the grand old mosque of India, the Jama Masjid.
But he would let his children play with destiny, and choose what they'd like to do.
A tradition, a trade intertwined with his identity was handed down to him by his father, who urged him to not relinquish what they had been fated to do as Bhishtis or the water carriers.
His work earns him a lot of blessings, but hardly any money. For years, ever since he was a 12-year-old boy, he has carried the weight of this tradition, living away from his family in a dargah on the steps of the mosque. Faith sustained him. It still does. It is his service to the two saints. Within the complex with its green and red tombs, he has spent thirty years getting up at the crack of dawn, filling water in the goat hide sacks from the well, and returning in the evenings to sleep in the corridors of the shrine, under the watchful eye of the saints. He never let desire, ambition or aspiration corrupt him. He also knew his limitations. He never went to school, didn't know any other trade.
He has collected more blessings than money over the three decades. That would do for him. There's heaven beyond the world. That's where he will get his dues.
"I am the last man to do this. My children don't want to do this and I won't let them. Times have changed. Our role is no longer what it used to be," he says, crouching next to the well.
He won't shackle his children with the role assigned to them ages ago that continues to define them, or constrict them within the confines of what they are supposed to do – quench thirst of hundreds of men who come to offer their prayers at the mosque.
Shakeel, 42, lives in the little complex with his three brothers and his nephew Rashid, who took on the water carrier's role recently. Rashid, 16, was a wayward child who dropped out of school, got into wrong company. So they got him here and now the young boy, who has a disdain for this work, goes about doing it silently. His eyes have a rebellious glint, and he challenges his uncles. But when Shakeel says he would box his ears, he retreats.
"He brought it upon himself. Had he continued in school, he would not end up here," his uncle says.
At the time, living in Gajraula in Moradabad district of UP where he hails from, he didn't know better. This was something his great grandfathers had done, and his father Bashir didn't question it. Shakeel followed into his footsteps.
When his father's health started deteriorating, Shakeel told him to go to their native village and rest. His shoulders were ready to take on the baggage of tradition from his ailing father. In time, they would bear the brunt of the tough task.
Thirty years ago, he came to Jama Masjid and sewed the goat hide he purchased from Ghaziabad and he was ready to begin a lifelong vocation of being a water carrier.
"I pray to the saints for health and vigor. Let's see for how long I can do it," he says.
He earns around Rs. 100 on a regular day. Sometimes, his earnings double. But still the money is less. He sends almost all of it home to his wife and four children keeping only a small allowance for himself. His wife Zareen Khatoon's family gave up on water carrying long ago. Now, they work on farms for little money.
In the mornings, after he has delivered the water to the few hotels and chai kiosks in the mosque complex, he sits at the little bench just outside the dargah sipping tea. The breakfast consists of two matthas and a cup of sugary, milky tea with cardamoms. That done, he carries the water from the well to anyone that call for him. A glass costs Rs. 1 now. When he had had started, it was 10 paise. After the prayers have been offered in the evening, the crowd begins to thin. Yet, he paces up and down. Around 9 pm, he walks into the dargah, hangs the hide sack on the wall, goes out again to eat dinner at one of the little shops selling kebabs and roots. They all know him by name. When the bottled water arrived on the scene and the MCD's water tankers rolled in, the bhishtis started to lose work. Many have taken on other vocations. A few like Shakeel have survived.
They call them the pride of the mosque. From the days when the kings ruled from the Red Fort, they have been there. A lot has changed but they are the reminders of an age gone by. In their hide sacks, they also carry the baggage of nostalgia for the old timers, and are a relic of the history for the young who find them a museum piece.
On Fridays, he doesn't ask for money till the time the evening prayers are over. His wages are the duas that escape from the parched lips and he is content with those. The promise of heaven is bigger than the prospect of earning on the day when more than the usual numbers crowd at the mosque.
"Sabab jitna mile, thoda hai. Blessings are never enough," he says, his fine wrinkles accentuated with a small smile that forms on his lips.
There is that solace at least.
"It is a lost tradition. We are dragging it somehow. The reason I kept at it because I didn't dare to dream big. But my sons have dreams. They talk about running big businesses. Why should I cut their dreams short," he says. "My wife is against the idea of her children taking this up. I understand."
Often the brothers take turns in returning to the village to do the batai during the harvest time on others' farms. That ensures some meagre earning. For the landless peasants, life has become tougher. Prices have increased. The old barter system that was an integral part of the village economy has been replaced.
In the old days, in the village where his ancestors supplied water to the households in exchange for grain, the residents clung to their roles. They hardly ever stepped out of the confines of their defined roles Their caste was tied to what what they did. Bhishti is a word derived from the Persian word Bhisht, which means paradise. Because of what they did, providing water to thirsty soldiers who were protecting Islam, they were given the title.
Shakeel doesn't know whether he would get to heaven. But he knows many times over, people have whispered blessings in his ears as he bent down to pour them the sweet water from the well that they say is more than 350 years old.
That well lies in the dargah complex of one Hare Bhare Baba. There are two tombs – a red one, and a green one. It is here where the five bhishtis sleep. Their possessions are tucked away in the enclosures in the walls. Faith provides them sustenance. Every nit during the scorching summer months, he spreads his sheet in the passage, under the sky, and sleeps. In the winters, he moves to the inner sanctum and sleeps flanked on either side by the two tombs.
"We date from the times of the Prophet. This is a pious endeavor which defines our lineage. Alas, we fell prey to the demands of modern times," he says, as he offers water to a couple from Andhra Pradesh who have come to pay obeisance to the saints, one who of was a martyr, slain by Aurangzeb, the Mughal king. "I have lived here all my life, at their feet, and served them."
His forefathers came to the mosque long ago and since those days when the mosque built by Shahzahan was still new, they have been living at the dargah. Centuries have passed and all sorts of changes have filtered in but the bhishtis have remained. When there was no MCD water supply in the now crumbling havelis and cramped quarters of the old city, the bhishtis supplied the water to the households as they did in every city - Kolkata, Mumbai.
"We belong to where a dargah is. We serve," Shakeel says.
Sweat runs down his back as he pulls out bucket after bucket of water from the well. He has lost count of the refills. The bhishtis have their patrons. A few followers feel the water from the well will enforce their faith. He staggers out with the load of 20 litres of water slung on his back.
Outside the twin dargah of Sarmad Shahid and Hare Bhare Shah, his elder brother Jameel sits, lost in thought. A frail man, he is resting. There is not enough work for five bhishtis. But the promise bound them. So they have resigned themselves to be the pall bearers of the prescribed role in the society.
Sarmad was a naked fakir who was madly in love with a Hindu boy who sang his poems, as the legend goes. He was later executed by Aurangzeb and the tomb, red in color, symbolizes the passion and the violence in his life, which finally dissolved in the love of God as Sufis believe.
And that love is infectious. As a member of the Abbasi community, named after their patron Saint Hazrat Abbas Alamdar, who fetched water in a skin-bag and quenched the thirst of the followers of Imam Husain on their way to Damascus, he is a Sunni Muslim but he believes the saints are the caretakers of his life and wellbeing.
The saint Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed is believed to have come to India from Iran. Belonging to a Jewish family, as the legend goes, his search for the truth of Allah led him to accept Islam. He denounced clothes as a means to break free from the world.
On lonely nights, Shakeel says he has conversations with God. There is no television, no radio. From a kiosk outside selling CDs of qawalis, music flows into the compound.
"My conversations are about everything," he says. "We are Allah's people."

"A city only exists for those who can move around it.”

This is what I got from a conference about social life of the cities. A really interesting take on the spaces in the city and the people on the periphery who are taking over the space they have been pushed out of through street art.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 27, 2011

"The city belongs to those who can move around it."

That's what the slide said. She calls it a manifesto, a campaign
slogan of sorts of the urban youth, mostly from poor localities,
pushed to the periphery by the lopsided development in Brazil's Sao
Paulo, a city of 16 million people, a city that's is the canvas for
the youth, disgruntled with their situation, victims of fear and
crime. They move around it, and take over its urban space, reducing
barriers of class and colour in their imagination.
Teresa Caldiera, a professor at University of California Berkeley and
an anthropologist, who is researching the spatial segregation and
street art in Sao Paulo in Brazil, walked the audience through a
selection of snapshots of graffiti and tagging in the city torn by
crime and divided by inequalities.
Hers is a study of the mushrooming street art, including graffiti and
tagging in Sao Paulo and the act of owning the city, asserting their
identities through the street art, often representations of self in
context of the society, and the process of urbanization that is now
being witnessed by major cities in the world, including Delhi.
At the three-day conference “The 21st Century Indian City” organized
by the Center for South Asia Studies, Center for Global Metropolitan
Studies, and Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics at UC
Berkeley and Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, Teresa talked about
the social life of the cities and her project of studying spatial
segregation in cities in the midst of urbanization and the creation of
public space by those relegated to the periphery.
Through a series of images, snapshots of the graffiti on the walls of
the city of Sao Pualo that range from angry outbursts to vivid,
colorful images of the city and its harsh realities, she walked the
audience through a fascinating phenomenon that has everything to do
with political articulation and imposing new dynamics to social life.
Colorful, outrageous, ugly in a few instances, and very, very honest
in their being, the art was disturbing, too. But it wasn't devoid of
hope, of assertion in the face of what has become a painful reality
for those on the other, darker end of the spectrum defined by the
growing inequalities of our times.
In her slides, a slice of the social life of the city of Sao Paulo,
the urban youth from the periphery of the city were taking over,
laying claim to the city through their art, spraying walls, climbing
up buildings and writing their names in balck, bold paint. This was
their way of seeking and proving their identities and leaving their
mark on territory from which they had been pushed out. Armed with what
is equivalent of their weapons, the spray paint cans and brushes and
imagination fueled by anger and desire to assert their identity, the
youth with the spray cans tied on either side of the bikes traveled
through neighborhoods, searching for walls where they could paint, and
in the process leave their mark, and eventually in their own
imagination, take over the city bit by bit, wall by wall.
Through her slides, she told the story of fear and crime and the
assertion of the identity of the poor, unemployed youth pushed to the
periphery, the favelas.
Street art, a collage of life and inspired by popular culture, then is
the creation of an urban space, a process of democratization of the
city.
It is also a counterforce to advertising, the billboards that contain
the aspirations of the society.
Teresa said movements in Brazil have led to exclusion and the practice
of enclosure practiced also by the upper classes who live in fortified
enclaves guarded by security guards. The difference is something they
challenge. They are against the segregated city.
A recent trend in the cities of the world are the creation of
controlled public spaces by the middle classes, or the elites who live
in fortified enclaves and thus assert their right to the city, and the
street art that is now scattered through the city of Sao Paulo and
can't be missed from its streets and alleys, are somewhat in
retaliation to this.

“It is the youth's engagement with the city,” she said.

The city then becomes not just a canvas for expression but its
graffiti entails a deep knowledge of the city that comes through their
backgrounds of working class neighborhoods, struggling families and
raging crime.

As inequalities between the rich and the poor grow and anger and
frustration abound, the side effects of development, liberalization
and globalization, the ones who have been left behind want to take
over, express their right to the city, a growing movement across the
cities of the world.

“It's like leaving one's mark all over the city,” Teresa said. “They
affirm their existence in the city and through the art, they also
expose the discrimination and they represent themselves in relation to
the city.”

In a city characterised by violence and fear and high homicide rates
in the poor localities, young men from the periphery are reversing the
rules of visibility, she explained.

The street art, also equated with vandalism, is illicit but it has the
potential of democratising the city.

“It makes the urban space literally a place of dispute,” she said.

Teresa has written on the subject in her book City of Walls and is a
professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley.

In India for the conference, she said she was surprised to see the
walls of the city shorn of such articulation.

It was the silent walls of Delhi that led to a chain of arguments with
social scientists like Amita Baviskar of the Institute of Economic
Growth in Delhi reasoning that it could mere acceptance on part of the
residents in the metropolis that is behind the silent and bare walls
of the city, or maybe the people on the margins haven't yet attained
the level of anger to propel such outbursts.

Street art is illegal in Sao Paulo as it is in most cities of the
world, but since it has been done on such massive scale, the police in
the city mostly resort to spot prosecutions rather than imprisoning
the ones who paint the city walls and tell stories through their spray
paint cans.

The galleries for such artists are alleys, the walls, and the
crumbling buildings where they can paint their narrative, and through
it the narrative of the city will flow.

In Delhi, a few walls have been subjected to such expressions but
these haven't been coherent, or tie into a theme.

When the Commonwealth Games happened in the city and the poor,
homeless and the migrants were forced out of the national capital
because nobody wants to showcase poverty in the face of such
extravaganza, the city woke up to a few graffiti. These were angry
outpourings on the state of the affairs, a lament on the corruption
that was rampant.

There are many reasons why unlike Kolkata and a few neighborhoods in
Mumbai that are breeding grounds for such expressions of the street,
Delhi has remained untouched. In its tucked away neighborhoods like
Hauz Khas, now rechristened as an artists' village, walls are colorful
and graffiti is a fashionable statement, a decoration that ties into
the larger image of the neighborhood lined with boutiques and designer
shops.

They say Delhi within its walls, within its confines, houses more than
30 cities, its layers pronounced in the way its residents live and
behave.

Social scientists say the sense of belonging to Delhi is lacking. For
many, it is rite of passage. They would move on. For migrants, it is
like camping in a city and then moving on to the next one till they
can find a holding somewhere. The class hierarchies in Delhi are
pronounced, and demarcating unlike Mumbai where slums flourish, even
thrive next to the high rises.

So, there is no involvement with the city. There are unauthorised
colonies that are demanding regularization and there are the numerous
RWAs that are promoting participatory citizenship among the residents
within its gated confines, but beyond those littered examples, there
are not many instances of the poor trying to assert their right to the
city, which is brutal in its discriminations, in its whimsical
attitude towards the poor that it can throw out anytime by thrusting a
ticket in their hands or rounding them up and transporting them to the
train stations as it happened during the CWG.

Street art isn't the Art for Art's Sake variety. It is about getting
reactions and these can range from the wow of admiration to
disapproval. Street art is in cities everywhere--New York, Los
Angeles, London, São Paulo, Philadelhia and even in Syria where the
protests kick started because writers on the walls of the nation were
imprisoned, and in reaction there were even more writings calling for
the dismissal of the government. As it gains more popularity and
becomes a potent symbol of protest, cities are grappling with its
spread and appeal. Branding it as illegal or transgressive hasn't
worked in most cases.

It is in this art that urban youth realize the city is up for grabs
and if not through political participation, at least through political
articulation of the walls that's for everyone to see, the poor can
claim their space with the splash of spray cans and because it is
illicit, they can even show their guts to do what's the society terms
as illegal.

In Delhi, the crime capital according to the government, the level of
anger hasn't reached the point where walls become the testimony to
that rage. It has also got something to do with the city's
infrastructure and what is within means for its poor youth. Spray cans
are expensive for those who barely make it to the point of earning
minimum wages. Rather than wasting their labour on the walls, they
provide for their families.

In India, we have had a protest culture of a different kind. We have
taken to the streets to denounce reforms, policy changes, everything.
But recently, the protest street behind the Jantar Mantar monument was
taken pver and rules of protest were set into motion. With that space
gone, maybe soon the walls of the city will replace the protest street
with political articulation, and the right to the city will come into
being. Till then, we can move around in a city of blank walls that
speak nothing.

Where is our space?

That night, when I was at India Gate to report on the celebrations on the World Cup victory, I was wondering about the lack of a public space that encourages us to engage with the city, its people.


Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 4, 2011

Where else would they have gone but India Gate. Because by some
telepathy, or some precedent, the joyous crowd that converged at the
India Gate on the night of the victory knew this was where the
celebration would be. In the backdrop of the monument, which is
symbolic of the nation's achievements, the revelers wanted to dance
and wave the flag.
But they hit the barricades, and like a giant wave hitting the
shoreline, it turned inwards, the swelling mass of people and it
became a moving celebration, choking city roads.
I went to India Gate, too. Because this to me was the monument that
celebrates India, its achievements. As I sifted through my list of
possible venues to witness the mass celebrations, India Gate was the
only public space that fit the bill.
This would have been the people's engagement with the city. But the
state chose to isolate the monument, and push back the revelers. On
the day of the semi-final, the streets were clogged and the traffic
was stalled for hours as residents came out in large numbers to
celebrate the victory over Pakistan.
In their imagination, the urban gathering had wanted to claim the city
by the act of celebration at its most symbolic place, the national
monument that the state chooses to host its Republic Day functions to
celebrate India's achievements.
The World Cup was an achievement. Only a couple of days ago, the
crowds had descended on the monument and danced on the streets, and
strangers were united by complex emotions ranging from pride to love
for the country and by their choice of the place to celebrate their
happiness when India defeated Pakistan.
The joyous crowd on the night of the final victory was looking to
rediscover the city's center in order to celebrate an urban gathering
where strangers living in the metropolis could shake hands, embrace
each other and dance to music blaring out of the car windows.
From all over the city, revelers came to the national monument.
This was a moment of unity, an interaction bound by a pervasive
patriotism and pride and a central urban space was required. Because
the monument reflects the nation is some way, people from the NCR
region like Gurgaon also came. Facebook was rife with pictures of
celebrations. Newspaper reporters headed to india gate, including me.
That was the obvious choice. Where else would we find the mass
celebration?
Delhi is a vast city, and continues to seek new territory. One could
argue parks and open spaces scattered throughout the city reflect the
response of urban planning to the needs of society for open spaces.
But we still lack a central public space where celebrations, concerts
or fetes can he held.
But we were confounded by these barricades. The crowd was befuddled
too. They still came to see an echo of their own sentiment, to find
reassurance from others, to witness their celebration in unison with
others', and to be one with the city.
But they hadn't expected to hit barricades beyond which the monument
lay. Delhi, the national capital, has no central space the residents
can identify as a platform to get involved with the city, partake in
its life and what it has to offer. The city has parks but there is no
central urban space where they can celebrate, protest or just be. In
fact, the national capital has no urban space in that category when
residents can engage with the city, an entity in its own right, and
interact with it through others belonging to or claiming their right
to the city.
William H. Whyte, an American urbanist, wrote that people go to “urban
spaces by choice – not to escape the city, but to partake of it.” The
city has a soul and that soul comes to life in these kinds of central
spaces that also have a democratizing effect, where anyone can go.
What Whyte wrote hasn't lost its relevance when we try to analyze the
social life of the cities and how urbanization plays into people's
assertion of the right to the city, a growing concept worldwide.
Public spaces are forums where this right is exercised. Given Delhi's
demographics and distribution, both social and economical, a lot of
residents have no access to parks or public spaces where they live.
For instance, unauthorized colonies, resettlement colonies and slums
that make up Delhi. For them to have a social life and rightful
engagement with the city, such a space is a must.
In blocking the access to the monument, the state had its reasons.
They spoke about vandalism and disruption to traffic. But traffic was
disrupted no matter what they thought or anticipated. Maybe not at the
monument, but in the streets leading to it, that became scenes of mass
cheer. Even the UPA leader Sonia Gandhi came out on the streets to
celebrate, sitting in her car window, waving to the masses a she drove
around.
Our vision of cities and its pubic spaces have gone wrong. In making
Delhi a world class city, we have denied the city of a central space
where residents can go, and expect to find others like them. Of
course, over the weekends, the India Gate becomes the picnic spot for
city goers but this isn't an urban gathering on the scale the national
capital witnessed that night.
Happiness and anger are hard to contain, particularly when they are
triggered by the state's wrongs or achievements. Only on the streets,
the emotions find their expression. We used to have a protest street
behind the Jantar Mantar monument and before that, at the Boat Club.
But in the months leading to the Commonwealth Games, the
administration banned pitching tents and overnight stays at Jantar
Mantar. Now protests have to be planned within a certain time frame.
That's a right to the city that was encroached upon.
Whyte had urged the city planners to celebrate urban gatherings. He
said these must be encouraged as it is part of the social life of the
cities.
"People have a nice sense of the number that is right for a place, and
it is they who determine how many is too many,” he said.
Whyte, who wrote The Organization Man, said how people behave in
public spaces are indeed the reflections of them as social creatures.
In India, we tend to erupt in cheer. We like to celebrate, and we like
to share happiness with all. Streets are our platform, our stage.
That should be the basis for zoning laws and urban development. In the
cities that I have spent time in, including Patna where the Gandhi
Maidan for decades has served as a place of celebration and as a
platform for protest, residents have identified with some public space
where they would all congregate as part of the urban gathering
phenomenon.
In Delhi, the planning has not envisioned such an urban space. It
hasn't accounted for its residents' social behaviour.
Urban spaces in our times need to cater to the society's needs. Social
and spatial implications of changing lifestyles in cities with
personal space shrinking as urbanization peaks demand that urban open
spaces that are planned take these into account.
As places of expression of the city's diversity and its
democratization process, these urban spaces need to be rethought and
reconsidered. These are spaces of real, social interaction like on the
night of the World Cup finals where people got out of their virtual
mode on social networking sites or email transactions to actually meet
and celebrate.
The barricades were the state's reaction to the concept of such a space.

Loneliness in the city - tale of Noida sisters' self-imposed exile

This was a bizarre story, convoluted and tragic. As I stood outside their flat, I wondered what the city and its realm of public and private spaces can do to you.
An edited version appeared in The Indian Express on April 14, 2011.


Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 13, 2011

A hand would sneak out, grab the packet of grocery and the door would shut.
Once he peered inside but he could see nothing. He couldn't trace the hand to a face.
Birpal, the delivery man from Maha Laxmi Store in the nearby Ganga Shopping Complex, always took the same items to the sisters – milk, bread, biscuits, butter, tea and snacks. The cheque would promptly be handed by the 9th of every month. The bill usually amounted to Rs. 2500 for a month.
Last he went to drop off the items was on Feb. 16.
The sisters never called again. The phone connection was cut off. The outstanding bill was around Rs. 400. The electricity bill until December 2010 was around Rs. 10,000. Somebody had ransacked their mailbox looking for traces of their former lives. It only contained a few uncleared bills.
In the quiet neighborhood, everyone kept to themselves. Most of the army officials had come to spend their retirement here. No little children play outside, and the afternoons are bereft of much activity.
At the Kailash Hospital, an emaciated Sonali Behl lay on the bed. She hadn't been told her elder sister Anuradha had died of cardiac arrest in the morning after the two had been rescued from their Noida apartment where they had allegedly shut themselves for the last six months.
She asked for biscuits when the hospital staff brought her a sandwich. She chewed on one for a long time while looking at the ceiling. Someone asked if she would like to watch the news. She said no to the cacophony of her own tragedy.
“Please cover me,” she said.
The staff pulled over the blanket.
When she was rescued a day before, she had been wearing three layers of woollen clothing. Her teeth had stained, and her hands were mere bones. The deprivation she had imposed upon herself had taken its toll.
At 8 am on Tuesday, Usha Thakur was frantically knocking at the door of flat no. 326.
A few members of her NGO had alerted her about the bizarre case of the two sisters who had chosen to shut themselves in.
On Monday, the police had visited the flat once again. They came without a woman cop and so they returned after the sisters refused to open the door.
In the morning, Thakur went herself. She jumped over on to the terrace and peeped inside.
“I saw the two women. One was on the couch, the other was abusing us,” she said. “I called a carpenter and then we called the police.”
It was only when the carpenter started to break down the door, Sonali opened the door.
She was shrieking.
“Call the doctor. Help my sister,” Sonali said.
They were rescued and rushed to Kailash Hospital where Anuradha, 41, died of multiple organ failure at around 8 am on Wednesday.
The other is fighting for life in Room no. 163 at Kailash Hospital, oblivious of her sister's death.
“This raises a question on the society at large. What were they doing?,” Thakur said.
But in a neighborhood in a satellite town where mostly the retired army officials are staying, privacy is a given. They live out their lives behind their closed doors, and exchange greetings once in a while. On Diwali and other festivals, they sent sweets to their neighbor's houses.
A newsletter Community Samvad that raises neighborhood issues in Sectors 28, 29, 37, 21,and 25. It was started more than 10 years ago and it was started by a civilian Vinod Agarwal who stays in Sector 15 A.
The editor Kiran Bhardwaj came to Sector 29 looking to decode the mystery.
“Many people don't like intervention. These sectors are full of senior citizens and also floating population of students. In a few neighborhoods, they look after each other. We generally know about each other. They keep to their units,” she said. “They usually meet in clubs. Privacy is respected.”
So, the community newspaper is their connector, their social directory.
Thakur has lashed out against the RWA, the neighbors. The neighbors said they did their bit but the sisters denied them access, refusing all help. They checked with Vinod Kumar, the man who supplied the grocery to the sisters, and they knew they were ordering. They didn't want to intrude beyond that.
In the neighborhood this wasn't a new story. They had known about the sisters, the issues that plagued them but they chose to respect the space.
“It was not a new case,” H Sharma, the ward president, said.
Their father Colonel (retired) OP Behl had passed away in Agra in December 1992 after a road accident. Their mother died in 1995 and the elder sister left her job in 1997 to take care of the family.
When the brother moved out, they withdrew choosing isolation and deprivation.
Nobody knows why the sisters shut the door to the world. They could only speculate and that's what they did, rummaging through their memories of the family that lived a secluded life, rarely opening the door to let others in.
“The elder one had given up her job in Dehradun to manage the house after they lost their parents,” one neighbor said.
Every morning, when she got up to make tea for her husband who left to play golf at around 5 am, Mrs. Chadha would see the light in the kitchen across the street on.
Anuradha would scream, throw the dishes and that became a daily affair until a couple of months ago when the lights went out.
“They weren't very interactive but I used to see Anuradha come down and buy vegetables from the vendor but that was quite sometime ago. A few months ago, I saw them stocking up on onions and potatoes,” she said. “There are all sorts of theories. They had chosen to shut themselves. We tried to help but they refused.”
The house remained out of bounds. Sonali had carried the keys with herself to the hospital.
The rescuers had to jump on to the terrace of the first floor apartment to break into the house. Through the glass, they saw one woman lying on the couch, and the other screaming, growling at them, asking them to leave.
When they tried to break open the door, Sonali finally let them in.
She even took out a diary and gave the police and the RWA member Col. H Sharma their brother Vipin's number.
Anuradha lay on the couch, dying. Sonali picked up a file and allowed her to be rescued.
When Brigadier Jagdish Singh stepped inside the living room, he could see nothing. The odour that emanated from the two humans that lived in the closed space for six months, the curtains drawn, the furniture covered with sheets, was too much to bear.
He lived upstairs with his wife. The couple who moved to Sector 29 in 1999 had known the family. They had even attended the brother's wedding in 2007 when the sisters had come to invite them with a packet of sweets and a card.
“We sensed something was wrong when they stopped putting out the garbage about the month ago. The house always remained dark. We didn't know the electricity had been cut off. We assumed they were saving on the bills,” Poonam Singh said.
A few of months ago, the couple had alerted Col. Sharma, who in turn sent a guard to check on the sisters.
Then the police was called in February.
They came to the door that led into a living grave of sorts and knocked. No answer. They went back. The next day when they returned, a frail voice answered from the darkness “We are fine. Please go away.”
The door shut again.
A couple of times Dr. MJU Khan's wife had attempted to gain access into their lives that remained a mystery to the neighbors. Sonali, who used to work as a store manager in a complex in Sector 63, had quit in 2008. They lived quietly, seldom going out.
“They had imprisoned themselves two years ago,” Bigadier Jagdish Singh said. “They hardly spoke to anyone. Nobody came to their house.”
Poonam Singh tried calling the landline a couple of times to check but nobody answered the calls.
In the neighborhood, where mostly former army officials live, not many know each other. Consumed by their own routines, their television sets drowning out the other human voices, they could never predict that it would come to this. Till the time, they spotted the delivery man carrying the supplies upstairs, they knew the sisters were alive. Beyond that, they gave them their privacy.
On one of the windows, the bees had started to make their home. The dust had accumulated in layers.
Nobody hung out any clothes to dry on the terrace that looked out on the main road.
Isolated in their time warp, the younger sister had once asked a neighbor what time it was. Again through an opening in the door.
A doctor who has been monitoring Sonali said she spoke about negative energy that had crept into their lives after their mother died in 1995.
“She said they were feeling insecure,” the doctor said. “She is delusional but she is relevant at times.”
Anuradha gave into depression much earlier. Once the brother moved out with his wife, the elder sister became quiet. Then they lost their family dog Chhoti six months ago.
The vacuum in their lives was spreading, consuming them.
They stopped taking calls, abandoning the world, shutting themselves in. The losses kept piling, and finally the debris of their lives claimed one of them.

The politics of protest space

An edited version appeared in The Indian Express on April 9, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 8, 2011

After midnight when the television channels were showing reruns of their protest street coverage, a few men were silently pinning their poems, and cards on the walls.
Only the hunger strikers and a few supporters remained. About 150 of them. The shrunken space was all theirs.
Anand Singh from Ghazipur was claiming his space. He was asserting his identity.
“Hum woh nahi jo tumhe rahon mein akela chor denge
Hum woh nahi jo ek pal mein nata tod denge
Hum toh aapke woh chahne walen jo aapki tooti sanso mein apni saans jor denge ...”
A card was stuck on the wall addressed to “Mrs. Sonia.”
“This is my first hunger strike in my life. Credit goes to you.”
Suddenly everyone had a forum.
The protest had two faces – the one that was caricatured and captured during the day, the other, more real that simmered through the night and reclaimed the space from the television crews.
A few candles were still fighting it out. The crowd had thinned. The OB vans were parked in a lane, submerged in darkness, and not so intrusive as they were during the day when they hailed the street as
Tahrir Square, a spot where revolution was being born.
The space was up for grabs. Everyone had a context, a connection, a sales pitch.
Through the day, the street had become a marketplace of sorts, too, with LVA (Layered Voice Analysis) representatives permeating the crowd and handing over their pamphlets to the people who had gathered.
They claimed they had patented the technology that could decode voice to “reveal human intensions, to detect deceit and frauds and thus help Fight Frauds, Corruption and Crime.”
They were experts at “Unlocking the Secrets of the Voice. Revealing the DNA of thoughts.”
On the sidelines, the vendors were happily selling food. A man had even come with a bag carrying cheap sandals and was sitting at the protest street waiting for buyers.
Shyam Nath has been here for the last two days. He was selling snacks. A few children were crouching and hunting for leftovers.
“I usually come when the rally comes. I saw on television and thought my sales would go up,” he said. “I know they are fasting but others are not.”
Manish Tiwari, a Delhi University student, was perched precariously on a bench and carried a huge placard.
“Suno … bharat ki galiyon se yeh awazen aati hai. Jinhe bhains charana tha, woh sarkaren chalate hai.”
“After so many days, I have got a forum,” he said.
On Thursday, the protest street near the Jantar Mantar monument was rediscovering its own potential. In this colorful and vocal space, other protests movements that had been relegated to the periphery had decided to inch closer and show support to Hazare's agitation that was hitting the headlines.
Bharat Swabhiman Yuva Sangathan, the Indian Ex Servicemen Movement, Art of Living were among the first few. Later, Paryavaran Sanrakhshan Parishad entered the street beating dhols.
A horde of television crews had descended on the street capturing the mood at what they referred to as “revolution ground” similar to Tahrir Square in Egypt.
They weren't going to let the moment of their redemption slip away from them.
“We decided we have to take this up. Else, people will say that the media has been bought over, it is corrupt,” Akhilesh Singh, a reporter with Sudarshan News, said. “What is immoral here?what's wrong is supporting the movement?”
Ravish Kumar, anchor and reporter at NDTV, was standing on a raised platform, taking in the ariel view of the dharna. He had found his ground, his pitch.
“I am not fasting but I am supporting this. I even went on the dais yesterday and spoke about it,” Kumar said. “This has revived the dharna concept. If you get an opportunity to be honest, objectivity gets better.”
CNN IBN's Rajdeep Sardesai came in the evening to anchor his 9 pm show. He had tweeted earlier.
“off to Jantar Mantar. Is it India's Tahrir Square in a manner of speaking? Hope to anchor india at 9 from there.”
His wife Sagarika Ghose tweeted she was delighted to see her son at Jantar Mantar.
After 12, when the cameras stopped rolling, people laid claim to the agitation, asserting themselves through art, slogans and manifestos.
A few men spoke about their frustrations, the ordeals of the common man who had been tagged as middle class. They spoke about their mounting electricity bills, the taxes, the corruption during the Commonwealth Games, the numerous other scams that had disillusioned them. The least they could do was come there and show solidarity with this apolitical agitation.
Rashmi Singhal, an advocate at the Tis Hazari Court in Delhi, had decided to volunteer through the night. In the evening, she had heard them announce they would need people to assist.
"This is everyone's movement. We had all been waiting for someone to do this,” she said.
A man was sweeping the street. He too was claiming the space inch by inch.

People [Live]

The protests were in two parts - the one that was caricatured and captured, the other that simmered through the night.

Amplified by the media, the protest by Anna Hazare was being hailed as a revolution. But in the dead of the night when the cameras weren't rolling, the others came to claim the space that was up for grabs putting up posters, setting up the stage for their protests that would be one with the hunger strike.



Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 7, 2011

“Come join the wind, make it a storm, and the storm will then become a tornado,” Gurmeet Singh, a Manmohan Singh lookalike said on camera.
The ANI reporter was quick to ask him if he thought the Prime Minister would relent to Anna Hazare's demands since the turbaned man resembled the country's leader.
“Janta is the king. They have to listen,” Gurmeet Singh said.
Behind him, the crowd enamored by his resemblance to the prime minister shouted on camera “Manhoman duplicate zindabad, Anna Hazare zindabad.”
The reporter was done. Now, the cameraman wanted his time.
“Chalo naare lagao,” he told the spectators, who obliged.
“There's not a single television channel I have not given interview to,” Singh said, as he walked away to look for more airtime. “My face is God's gift.”
But the reporter who caught him on the sidelines of the agitation, a carnival of sorts, was probably thinking he had got an exclusive. In that moment, within the confines of the space that has been labeled as the protest street of India, everything was an exclusive. The footage, manufactured, was designed to amplify the agitation, to make it seem as India's revolution.
Towards evening, CNN IBN's Rajdeep Sardesai tweeted “off to Jantar Mantar. Is it India's Tahrir Square in a manner of speaking? Hope to anchor india at 9 from there.”
His wife Sagarika Ghose tweeted she was delighted to see her son at Jantar Mantar.
This was redemption. There was the Mahatama, and he was starving for all of us. He was no less than the Messiah carrying the cross. People would drink his blood, and be salvaged. It was a united front. The pillars of democracy had increased to incorporate media, which was being hailed as the movement's biggest supporter, and the people at large, S Chandra, a former bureaucrat who was walking around the street to voice his support on television, said to a Dilli Aajtak reporter, who was holding the mic as if it was a powerful weapon that alone will fight the corruption.
“Masses are with the media. In physics wen have coefficient of friction. Here, it is coefficient of corruption,” he shouted into the mic. The reporter looked bored. There were too many of these self-styled fighters.
“IPL not be gathering momentum. We make news. This will eclipse World Cup,” he said, not wanting to cut short his “live”.
On Thursday, the protest street near the Jantar Mantar monument was rediscovering its own potential. A horde of television crews had descended on the street capturing the mood at what they referred to as “revolution ground.”
They weren't going to let the moment of their redemption slip away from them. The hunger strike, the revival of dharna was breaking news. It was also going to be “shaking news” because they would ensure the government succumbs. This was their agenda.
“We decided we have to take this up. Else, people will say that the media has been bought over, it is corrupted,” Akhilesh Singh, a reporter with Sudarshan News, said. “What is immoral here?what's wrong is supporting the movement?”
You don't only report what you see, you also get involved with the news. In their minds, they had declared it a movement and they were all scrambling to be a part of it, emulating others of their fraternity.
This is the moment to redeem the media. And they were doing it by participating in the dharna, voicing their support and joining the agitation.
Ravish Kumar, anchor and reporter at NDTV, was standing on a raised platform, taking in the ariel view of the dharna, the protestors. He was surrounded by protestors, and by other reporters, who thought of his as a hero, asking him about his participation.
He said he was supporting the agitation.
“I am not fasting but I am supporting this. I wasn't there is 1947 but I am 2011. I even went on the dais yesterday and spoke about it,” Kumar said. “There can be bigger institution than the people at large. This has revived the dharna concept. If you get an opportunity to be honest, objectivity gets better.”
He was the man who was one with the movement, reporting, and living it, too.
RIP objectivity, a spectator said. He had come there to witness what someone on twitter had compared to a revolution saying “You have to be there to see it.”
He was standing there, witnessing the tamasha in front of him, the television crews perched on wooden benches, capturing the movement.
Like how the Katrina floods in the USA in 2008 altered TV journalists' objectivity, and CNN's Anderson Cooper, whose breakdown on television over the disaster that the floods brought in their wake, became a high point of every TV reporter worth their salt.
They were enacting their ritualistic performances, and they had been trained in the “myths of liveness”. They had “personalized” their reporting by mixing their empathy,frustration and anger. As they worked within their limited “grounded and objective” news alongside the enthusiastic supporters and the fasting individuals, these were on an uncharacteristic display on camera.
Through the day, the street had become a marketplace of sorts, too, with LVA (Layered Voice Analysis) representatives permeating the crowd and handing over their pamphlets to the people who had gathered.
They claimed they had patented the technology that could decode voice to “reveal human intensions, to detect deceit and frauds and thus help Fight Frauds, Corruption and Crime.”
They were experts at “Unlocking the Secrets of the Voice. Revealing the DNA of thoughts.”
On the sidelines, the vendors were happily selling food. A man had even come with a bag carrying cheap sandals and was sitting at the protest street waiting for buyers.
Shyam Nath has been here for the last two days. He was selling snacks. A few children were crouching and hunting for leftovers.
“I usually come when the rally comes. I saw on television and thought my sales would go up,” he said. “I know they are fasting but others are not.”
Yet another reporter was trying to analyze media's role. He said if the media hadn't taken a stand, and broadcast the “anshan” live, people wouldn't have come to show their support.
At least 200 young men had traveled from Aligarh Muslim University after they watched the street turn into Tahrir Square, the space in Egypt where the revolution gained its momentum. They dressed in their trademark balck sherwanis and topis and moved around the street, trying to take in the movement which was being televised live by the hundreds of media personnel.
Umar Ahmad, the vice president of the student union at AMU, said they wanted to take the fight against corruption to Aligarh.
“So what if mostly we have the media here. This is media ki awaz. They are humans and they have emotions,” he said.
The spectators and the participants were mostly the media. Their OB vans were parked near the epicenter. They had change of guard, too. Other reporters were dispatched from the newsroom to take over from the one who had held the position since morning.
For the public, well-heeled of the society who came along to show their children the lost part of their history – the culture of dharna.
A young boy sat on the dais and said it was about his future and so he was on dharna.
A group of giggling school children from Bluebells School were recording the statement of a supporter, who was out of his breath as he tried to draw parallels between the non-violent struggle of the mahatama and the one that consumed his imagintion.
“We read about it on facebook. We discussed with teachers. We want to see the movement. We are going to make a presentation and take it to the school and support the cause,” Mridul, a Class 10 student, said.
“I like the missed call concept,” Purva Aggarwal, another student said.
A few supporters were snaking their way in and handing over pamphlets that urged the people to call on 02261550789 to know updates about the agitation.
The police on duty looked bored.
“It is indeed like a circus,” a police personnel said.
The pamphlet asked a prbing question.
“What can you do against corruption?”
It asked the people to come in huge numbers to Jantar Mantar.
“Go on hunger strike and pray for a corruption-free India,” it further stated.
It gave a background of Anna Hazare's last hunger strike.
Six corrupt ministers had to resign
400 corrupt officials had to quit their jobs.
The Maharashtra government had to implement the Right to Information Act.
In 2006, the central government had to roll back the proposal to amend the RTI Act.
In this colorful and vocal space, other protests movements that had been relegated to the periphery had decided to inch closer and show support to Hazare's agitation that was hitting the headlines.
They needed visibility too and what was a better way than to associate with the popular protest.
So banners were put up.
Bharat Swabhiman Yuva Sangathan, the Indian Ex Servicemen Movement, Art of Living.
In between, a saint climbed up on the stage and made the participants do breathing exercises.
A man kept filling up bottles of water to distribute to the people.
In that commotion, as the television media looked for more exclusives, Paryavaran Sanrakhshan Parishad entered the street beating dhols.
By that time, the television crews had exhausted their limited range of people. A few well-heeled women from the fortified enclaves of Vasant had come too. They wore stilettos and spoke in accented English. They denounced corruption on air, too.
A print reporter waited for Sangeeta who voiced her concerns in fluent English as a Northeast television reporter asked her if corruption affected her day-to-day life.
“Yes, it does,” she said.
She was later raising the same concerns for the other reporter. She looked happy. She had managed her airtime.
Manish Tiwari, a Delhi University student, was perched precariously on a bench and carried a huge placard.
“Suno … bharat ki galiyon se yeh awazen aati hai. Jinhe bhains charana tha, who sarkaren chalate hai.”
“After so many days, I have got a forum,” he said. “Media is playing a big role. If they hadn't supported us, the movement would have not reached the villages.
Yet another HMTV reporter had found an angle.
He was going to do a story on the movement on the Internet.
He was busy interviewing people about the agitation on social networking sites.
A 24-hour news channel needs constant fodder. They had to provide it from the street for they had chosen this as the umbrella news, as echoed by all.
They were reporting and when they were not, they were protesting. But it was all “Live”
And the high priest of TV journalism was just going to anchor his show from what he felt was like “Tahrir Sqaure.”
They were involved. This was taking reporting to new heights. This was public service journalism.

When MPs turn poets

An edited version of the article appeared in The Indian Express on April 5, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 4, 2011

"Pankh bhi hai, khula aasman bhi hai … phir yeh na udne ki majboori kyun.” (We have wings, and there is the open sky, too. But why can't we fly ...)

From her chair in the Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar recited the couplet from her poems on Women's Day. The members sat, brooding.
She was talking about the collective experience of women in India, the struggle for empowerment, lamenting the fact that the Women's Reservation Bill is still stalled in the Parliament.
She is the first Lok Sabha Speaker to have recited a poem from her chair as the members discussed the bill that aims to empower the women by facilitating political participation.
“If you give me permission, I would like to recite from a poem I wrote long ago,” she had said. Now, there is another outlet for her poems.
The Lok Sabha is all set to launch its first literary journal in Hindi soon. The Speaker will be launching it.
Her poems have been included in the first edition of the Sansadiya Manjusha, the half-yearly magazine that was conceptualized by the Lok sabha Secretariat, is a compilation of the writings of the members of the Parliament and its staff.
Kumar's two poems - “Salib ko dhota Masiha” (The Messiah carrying the Cross) and Shabri, which is the name of a woman ascetic in the Hindu epic Ramayana who belonged to the Bhil tribal community. According to mythology, Lord Rama had visited her hut and ate the berries picked by her and tasted by her to check if they were sweet. In her devotion, she had overlooked the fact that she should not have tasted the food before. She also belonged to the Scheduled Tribe.
Kumar is the first Dalit woman speaker of the Lok Sabha. Hailed as the Dalit face of the government, her poems speak of the Dalit struggle and their lot.
BJP's Ahmedabad MP Dr. Kirit Solanki has also contributed an essay on the process of democracy in India along with Dr. Mahesh Joshi, an Indian National Congress MP from Jaipur who has written on the sculpture in the Parliament. He writes that if perceived from a poet's eye, one can see the beauty of the complex.
There is an article on mandatory voting by INC MP from Delhi JP Agarwal as well where he talks about how political participating through voting rights is a must for effective governance.
Harnam Singh Takkar, the editor of the magazine, said the proposal for such a journal was mooted in October and it was appreciated by the members. Since the Rajya Sabha and several other assemblies have their own literary cum parliamentry affairs journals like Madhya Pradesh which has Vidhayani, it was time that Lok Sabha had soemthing of its own, he said.
“We have included relevant issues about Parliamentary processes. We have included the history of the Parliament and informative snippets about proceedings. We want to distribute it freely. It will be given to all the staff. In fact the Speaker has been involved with the magazine and she chose the cover page. She rejected the Parliament photo on the cover. She didn't want it as rutine. We got other designs and We solicited the pieces via the news bulletin we have for the members,” Takkar said. “This is above party politics. It doesn't support any political party or ideology. The editorial policy is that it will remain impartial.”
Takkar said he received a lot of entries for the first issue.
“I like Shabri. It is a very evocative poem,” he said.
Shabri is a poem where the protagonist is named after the mythological character. It is a personal narrative, an imagined conversation with a Dalit woman, who works as a domestic help cleanign peoples' homes and eating leftovers. In the narrative, Kumar speaks to the modern day Shabri. It is about the relevance of the community, a tale of their life, an existence marred by prevalent prejudice and stigma.
It is from her experience of her community that the poem flows. It is an insider's view. The community is the backbone of the urban life. Had they not been here to clean up, and support the new urban wealthy lifestyle, the city wouldn't stand. Shabri is the voice of the community. She comes from the slums, from the periphery of the urban landscape, marginalized and exploited.
“Mere shehar mein … shehar mein mere Shabri rehti hai. Wah jo gandi naali behti hai. Jhuggi tale wahi mere shehar mein shabri rehti hai. Mili hoon … ek din aayi thi mere ghar ki, bartan mal doongi, jhadu-pocha kar doongi, kuch paison aur jhuthan par reh loongi.”
“In my city, Shabri lives. Where the dirty drain flows, under the shadows of the slums, Shabri lives in the city. I have met her. She came to my house one day. She said I will wash the dishes, clean the house, and I will survive on meagre wages and leftovers.”
The magazine aims to promote Hindi language and Kumar said it would be voice of the Parliament, carrying its members' expressions in Hindi, which has the potential to unite the country.
For the longest time, the members and the staff had felt the need for such a magazine, she wrote in her message in the magazine. She has also lent her touch to the cover. Besides writing poetry, she also paints.
Her poems are woven around the Dalit experience and her gender. They are the stories of the struggle women and of the marginalized people.
“She isn't very vocal. So she finds her expression through her poems, which she recites in the House and elsewhere,” her spokesperson Rakhee Bakshee said.
In her speech at the Rashtriya Kavi Sammelan in the memory of her late father Babu Jagjivan Ram, the former Deputy Prime Minister and one of the most influential Dalit leaders of the country, she said there is a poet in all of us.
“Poems are nothing but an expression of pain and pleasure,” she said in Hindi. “It is a medium to express our hurt, and personal experiences. It gives relief to us.”
To her, it has become the expression of her Dalit angst, of her frustration with the state of things.
In Allahabad on a recent visit, she stood in front of the Ganges and recited “Kyun udas behti hai Ganga.” (Why the Ganges flows sadly.”
It stemmed from a lament on the pollution of the river, from her environmental concerns.
“People have called her soft power,” Bakshee said. “This is her way of expressing her emotions, her politics, her ideas and her angst. It is the voice of the marginalized.”
While she doesn't get much time to write her poetry after she became the Speaker, Kumar still tries to pen a few when she can spare a few moments.
“She is thinking of compiling her poems,” Bakshee said.
For now, she digs a couplet from the annals of her memory, a repository of her writings, and uses it to reflect on the state of affairs.
'A poet looks at the world in the same way as a man looks at a women – with surprise, bewilderment, and curiosity. The difference between a poet and a common man is all about the way they feel, seek, experience, and the ability and patience to express those,” she wrote in her speech.
Maybe as she writes that through the literary magazine, first-ever attempt in the Parliament, the members will be able to offer solutions to the pressing issues of our times, the Speaker too will be able to move the country through her poems and liberate herself in the process.

When we won the World Cup

An edited version was published in The Indian Express on April 3, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 2, 2011

His eyes shut, he bent down, gathered the tricolor that had fallen off the stick and kissed it fervently. It was ecstasy. Pure, unbridled joy.
And then he ran along the streets, wrapped in the flag, beaming with pride until he hit the barricades.
He was just one of the thousands of revelers that came out on the streets to celebrate India's win tonight. They were all headed to India Gate.
India Gate had become a pilgrimage of sorts. Everyone headed there just after the victory was confirmed.
They came from all sides like rivers trying to make it to the sea, vying to get to the host sooner than the other.
But the waves hit the barricades, and then turned inwards like a tsunami. That's how the revelries began the night India won the cup. Anger was overcome by happiness. The revelers forgave the police on duty, shook hands with them, even embraced them and obeyed. By then, the rivers had rolled backwards, and the city was flooding all over – with cheer, with love, with patriotism.
When Dhoni hit the ball and the ball rose high in the air, Baljeet Singh, the traffic personnel on duty at India Gate, knew the calm wouldn't last for long. The storm was coming. Tonight, they weren't going to let anyone come near the monument. Two days ago, when India beat Pakistan in Mohali, crowds had descended at India Gate. Women danced on streets, cars were stopped, traffic was disrupted.
Extra police force had been called in this time. Men in uniform stood guard in anticipation. They were nervous, too.
It was always tough to contain emotion. Almost three decades later, India had brought home the coveted cup.
Before then, the streets wore an eerie look. Then, the streets began to move.
The first revelers were politely asked to divert.
Then, the battle cries erupted. Bare chest men ran through the streets, holding the Tri-color. They didn't get past the barricades. But so what. They stood there, and danced. Even UPA chief Sonia Gandhi came out, and celebrated on the streets.
She sat in the car window like others, and waved and smiled.
Cars moved along slowly, their trunks open and music filled the streets of the national capital. Bhangra mixed with trance.
The emotion was potent, infectious.
The streets got a life of their own.
It was a moving celebration.
“We will break through these barricades to get there eventually. We will do it somehow. We must be allowed to express our happiness. We just want to celebrate,” Kedar Singh, a Bikaner House resident, said. He had come out on the streets to mingle with those who felt one with the victory.
The Shahjahan Road was choked with cars, all moving slowly. Young men leaped out of the car windows, and shouted. They hugged strangers, and held hands.
Even the policemen were smiling. They were humans, too. They had been calling their families and checking up on scores all through the evening. This was their celebration, too.
The atmosphere was heady. Car trunks opened, and Chak De India played. Men broke into a frantic dancing. All the while, they were moving away from the monument that looked solemn, devoid of the cheer that surrounded it.
Virendar Singh was shooting the scene on his mobile phone. He was preserving the moment. This was his first World Cup moment. The frenzy was what got to him. He wanted to capture it all.
“This is some memory I want to keep,” he said. “Look at this. I have never seen anything like this. It is like the city is erupting in some ecstasy.”
Then the ground underneath began to reverberate. A few cars had stopped. Music, a medley of songs blasted. Woofers were turned at their full.
That's when you know victory is ours. That's when the ground begins to shake, another man said. He said “congratulations” and walked away.
Tourist buses came, laden with gawking foreigners who peered out of the glass windows to see the cheer on the roads. Bikers had converged at the same place, the point where everyone had to turn inwards. It was like taking a U-turn after glimpsing the monument. It was at the U-turn that the strangers converged, and laughed, and danced before they moved on to make way for others.
Across from the monument, a man stood between two policemen and shouted "Bharat Mata Ki Kai." Another man clicked him. The policemen laughed.
This was a riot of a different kind. The adrenaline flowed freely, and spared nobody.

Most densely populated district in India is hub of migrants

North East district has always been a known area. I have been in its lanes many times looking for stories. It didn't come as a surprise when the census data revealed it has the highest population density in the country. In New Seelampur, it is not difficult to understand it is so. An edited version of the article appeared in The Indian Express on April 1, 2011.


Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 31, 2011

Now when he looks up, the sky comes to him in patches. Obscuring, obliterating the view are the new “highrises” that now dominate much of the landscape in the narrow quarters of New Seelampur, a resettlement colony established in 1965.
As per the 2011 Census provisional report, the north-east district of the national capital has the highest population density – 37,346 per sq km. In its colonies, the evidence is not hard to find. This is where urbanization has peaked. Rents are cheap, and finding accomodation isn't a task giving the lackdaisical police, residents said.
Vinod Kumar relocated to New Seelampur in the north east district in 1962 from Bela Road.
In the ensuing four decades, he has witnessed his block go through a transformation that took away much of the ease of the days gone by.
Seelampur is now in the midst of urbanization and ruralization, a culture cauldron with melting identities, and struggling families. This was one of the first resettlement colonies of Delhi where working class were dumped to make the city glisten and world class.
Across the road, French retailer Carrefour SA has opened its first store housing 30,000 brands. Like the builders, they too preyed on these neighborhoods. It sent its people into slums and unauthorised colonies, looking for kirana store owners to secure a clientele. Its glass building looks an anomaly among the hundreds of thousands of single-brick structures that are littered along the Metro line and along the river.
"There are all these manufacturing units and home-based industries. Every household is a unit where owmen work. In unauthorised colonies, one can buy a 100 square yard plot for Rs. 25 lakhs," local MLA Matin Ahmed said. "If we count all people, include those that no ration card, New Seelampur will have at least two lakh residents. How do we stop this? Census hasnt counted those who work in the factories. This is where employment is. How do we widen the roads? How do we improve basic amenities? Conditions are worse in unauthorised colonies like Jafrabad where almost no roads exist. This attracts a lot of builders. They have constructed 15 square yards flats. We all know how police acts. There is no code, no law."

It's nostalgia and then anger, and eventually frustration that grips him when he talks about his life in what has now become a ghetto with its youth dropping out of its schools, getting into petty crimes, and forcing its girls to remain indoors most of the time for fear of molestation.

North East district is an accident of geography. Iti is bounded by the Yamuna River on the west, Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh to the north and east, East Delhi to the south, and North Delhi to the west across the Yamuna.
Its three important administrative subdivisions Seelampur, Seema Puri and Shahdara. As per the 2001 census, the district's population was 1763712 and the density was 29,397 persons per square kilometer.
Over the last decade, the area absorbed a large number of migrants to the national capital.
Close to the South and Central districts, this is where most migrants came to settle over the years, finding their foot in these clusters where they could find cheap accommodation, and slowly try to integrate with the city.
Population went up as a result. With almost no regulations, and absolutely no planning, the resettlement colonies, mostly the allotments and the unauthorized slums like Sonia Vihar and JJ Colony, developed in a haphazard way.
In plots as small as 12 or 20 square yards, owners have built three-storey and in a few cases, five-storey buildings. The plots that were allotted by the government that resettled thousands of migrants in the 1960s ranged from 80 to 25 square yards were later sold to new settlers in parts.
“Yesterday, I called the police,” Kumar said, pointing to a building across the alley.
The top floor of the building had been dismantled, broken down.
“This is what has happened to this place. No wonder we are the highest in terms of human density. In that 20 square yard plot where this man built this four-storey building, there are 50 people living,” he said.
The one things that hasn't changed over the years is the demographics. The colony has remained poor. Only the working class lives here. A few jeans and shoes manufacturing units are scattered in its lanes, anchoring many of its women and migrant settlers.
“Because it was so close to central Delhi, this became the destination for the poor who could walk or cycle to their work sites,” he said. “Now builders have come to this part in the last three years and buying out these smallish plots and constructing flats and selling them to the poor who also want some ownership in the city.”
When the resettlement colony was planned and large populations, mostly migrants from Rajasthan, were moved to these parts, the plots were provisionally leased out to settlers and further sale was not allowed.
The area had been a farmland. But as the city expanded eastwards, and beyond the Yamuna, Seelampur found itself in the middle of rising land prices and overshooting demand and access to infrastructure.
In time, it transformed to a bustling region that specializes in the manufacture of jeans, leather shoes, jackets, incense, lathes, iron and timber goods, providing employment to workers in these home-based workshops.
Decades ago, when he had just moved to the plot allotted to his family, there used to be an open ground and houses looked different.
“We actually had a proper roof and these were single storey houses,” Kumar said.
The first wave of migrants to claim the colony were from Barielly in Uttar Pradesh and then Biharis followed in the 1970s.
Before then, Kumar recalled how they put their charpais in front of the houses and slept. Now, because crime has risen and there's fear that pervades the locality, they are confined to their small tenements.
Just down the lane, the cramped, colorful blue and green walls of the JJ Cluster are visible.
“That's the problem,” Kumar said. “Crime comes from there, and claims our neighborhood as well.”
Only a narrow drain divides the unauthorized from the allotments.
Then there was a wave of unplanned, illegal construction to absorb this new population.
Mohd. Sharif Ali, 22, built two extra floors of one-room each on his plot to rent those out. The family relocated to New Seelampur in 1965.
Rent is a survival factor in this colony. With inflation and given its social and economic indicators, informal sector workers and high dropout rates, it is a livelihood option.
“We get Rs. 2,000 as rent for the second floor. It helps,” he said. “But I remember the colony was not so crowded in the beginning. We had open grounds.”
Now, the children in the neighborhood play cricket in its narrow lanes.
The lanes are too narrow for four-wheelers to navigate them so even with their new money, those who can afford it, are hesitant to buy cars.
Those who bought now park them in the Metro parking lot across the road.
“What can they do? There is no space for humans here. Forget the cars,” Ali said.
A child sat defecating in the open drain. The lanes that lead into the labyrinths of this slum cluster are narrow. Lives spill over from the temporary structures on to the gullies. The lanes pervade the inner sanctums.
In one such establishment, a one-room tenement covered with an asbestos sheet, Phoolwati was cooking. Around 20 years ago, her husband bought the jhuggi. In this 12 square yard space, five people live. Outside, there is the border, the drain.
But the worlds it divide are strikingly similar to each other. Space is a non-entity here.
Spread over 60 kilometers, the north east district of Delhi has also been identified as Minority concentration district by Ministry of Minority Affairs. The basic parameters are minority population, illiteracy, work participation, health indicators etc. and given its lopsided development, it has remained one of the tragedies of the metropolis that has failed its inhabitants.
Now, the tags that sort of define this sprawling landscape of hutments and single-brick structures sans any aesthetics or planning, are violence, crime, poverty, and prejudice.
The north east district is a platter of resettlement colonies that were set on the vast farmlands in the city. In Jafrabad and Welcome and several other colonies, the victims of the 1984 Sikh riots were resettled.
Stories that come out of these human clusters are those of illegal embroidery units employing young children and anti-social elements that disturb the calm of the gentrified South Delhi and return to its maze of quarters where collective identity rules and the individual fades.

"Take care in Japan"

Standing there in the school watching the Japanese children bid farewell to those that were returning to Japan, I felt sad. I also felt admiration for the great courage these people showed in the face of the tragedy.

An edited version of the story was published in The Sunday Express on March 20, 2011.
Here is the link http://epaper.indianexpress.com/IE/IEH/2011/03/20/ArticleHtmls/20_03_2011_012_003.shtml?Mode=1


Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 18, 2011


A little girl embraced another girl.
“Take care in Japan,” she said, and put the garland around her neck.
The other girl bowed, smiled and walked to her seat.
In a row, they sat, garlanded and clutching booklets their classmates had presented them with drawings, notes and pictures.
These children at the Japanese School were returning to Japan, their country that is now in the middle of a catastrophe brought by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake that has swept away thousands of people off the shore, and even shifted the planet by 25 centimeters on its axis.
The stoic clam in the face of the disaster is what has defined the Japanese reaction to the havoc created by the giant tsunami waves that ripped the shores of the archipelago.
Even the children sat calmly and any anxiety they had was concealed despite the images that showed on the Japanese television channel – bodies, uprooted houses and trees, shelter houses full of evacuees, queues of people waiting for food.
They knew about the crisis in the homeland. Before the farewell ceremony commenced, the 200 children sat in a solemn prayer meeting for the hundreds of nameless victims in their country. Iwao Sawada, the principal, told them about the tragedy and the children listened on. Then they observed silence for five minutes, their hands folded in prayer.
A teacher in a saree looked on. She too was returning to Japan.
Another student told her classmate “Don't forget me when you are in Japan. Eat well, study and don't fear. All will be well.” Then, she bowed. Both smiled and returned to their seats. A couple of mothers wiped away their tears. They quickly turned their faces away.
The school would close Friday. The classes had gone on. Even what they described as “scene from hell” with trucks bobbing on the giant waves, and fires from the nuclear plants touching the skies, had failed to disturb the routine that they so meticulously followed.
“We are Japanese. Two years. We will rebuild everything in two years,” Sawada said as he walked away to preside over the graduation ceremony at the Japanese School in Delhi a day before.
It was pride in the face of disaster, a stoic calm he maintained to haul himself from what he feared was striking at the core of his being – the tsunami.
He wasn't going to let the world judge them as weak humans. The tragedy had struck. The way forward was to work towards reclaiming what was lost.
The Japanese, he said, were a disciplined lot. They would come out of this as they had before. Disaster was no stranger to them. For them, it has been a tale of suffering and renewal. In 1923, the Great Kanto quake had killed more than 140,000. In 1995, the Kobe quake killed 7,000. Even Sendai, the face of the wreckage now, had witnessed a tsunami in 1896 that claimed around 30,000 residents.
Outside the school, cars lined up and Japanese mothers got out with their wards, smiling and bowing. Collectively they were going to deal with the disaster that pronounced Japan, their homeland, as doomed in the headlines, with the stoicism that is ingrained in them, the calm endurance that defines them.
Inside the office of the Gako Bunka Education Society, donations poured in. It was all done quietly, methodically. A notice was put up outside the school and checks with generous amounts started to stack up.
The money would be wired to help the victims of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that hit the Japanese archipelago on March 11.
For the small Japanese community in India that are mostly concentrated in Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai, the news of the wreckage came via frantic phone calls, through the internet and emails and images on television.
They united in their grief and across their offices and schools, notices were put up asking for donations for their country.
It was quick, understated.
Katsu, the 72-year-old priestess at the Shanti Stupa in Indraprastha Park in the national capital, walked to the prayer room, chanting for those that perished.
“Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo.”
She beat the drums. The sound reverberated.
It is her belief that through the sound waves, the message of peace asking the victims to be strong would travel.
On Friday evening, she chanted again. For an hour, her hands relentlessly beat the drums.
In front of the frail priestess, the statues of Buddha and photos of Master Nichidatsu Fujii, who came to India in 1885, were lit up by a solitary bulb.
On the walls, images from Japan were hung.
Among them, the Fuji volcano in her native Shizouka captured for a calendar in the month of March.
Katsu has lived in India since 1986. In 1969, she had gone to Rajgir in Bihar and as she stood in front of the Buddha, she wanted to make an offering.
“I didn't have anything. No money. So, I gave myself to God. I became a monk,” she said.
The calamity that struck her country was God's will, she said.
“No bad fate falls like that. No storm comes just like that,” she said. “In the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thousands died. We will find a way out. This is a warning for the world. We must reflect on what went wrong. We will have to own the right path. We need faith.”
A monk from Orissa was flying to Japan the next day to help out. She is too old to travel but she said she would continue to pray for her country.
“What we can, we must do,” she said.
Outside, the white stupa loomed against the backdrop of a setting sun.
Katsu is among the 1,500 Japanese nationals that live in Delhi. There are around 4,500 Japanese residing in India.
When strangers stopped his wife and asked her if her family and friends were safe in Japan, Shinichi Yamanaka, the chief representative of Japan International Cooperation Agency, was overcome with emotion.
“It was such a warm gesture,” he said. “People we didn't know came up to us and showed their sympathies.”
This is Yamanaka's second assignment in India. When the earthquake hit, he was at a metro station with the new Japanese ambassador. He rushed to his office, collected the staff and inquired if everyone's family was fine. Then, they informed the Japanese volunteers spread across the country in rural areas working in the health care area.
“We are worried about the situation now with the leakage in the nuclear power plant. We are always checking news for updates. We have to see the situation and just have to put faith in the government,” he said. “They are doing their bit. See, the Japanese are disciplined and they coperative. Those are powerful qualities. We will come out of this.”
The tight-knit community has preserved its culture in the fast-changing landscape of the Indian society with its burgeoning malls, its aspirations.
There are three Japanese schools across the country. The one in Delhi is in a residential block, tucked away in one of its lanes.
There are no signs. Even the buses that ferry its students bear no names.
Its 200 students are from the expatriate families that are either working in the numerous Japanese companies in Gurgaon, Delhi and the Noida region.
Inside the campus, the homeland is recreated. There's a Japanese garden with its rocks and plantings and benches in the middle of the building. It can be viewed from anywhere. It is the courtyard where the school holds its assembly, and its functions.
The teachers are Japanese nationals. A few Indian staff work in its administrative wing but it is mandatory for them to know the language.
The children can attend the school that shifted to Vasant Kunj in 1991 from New Friends' Colony where it was first established in 1964, till Class 9 after which they can return to Japan to finish their studies.
The syllabus is what they follow in Japan.
Across the Deer Park, in the neighborhood market of Safdarjung Enclave, is Yamato-Ya, the Japanese convenience store.
There's a little table where customers can drink tea and munch on snacks.
There's everything that a Japanese cuisine requires in this small store.
A few meters down the block, there is the Japanese Association. There is a library, a recreation room and an office where one can find information on Delhi and where one can learn English, or go for a haircut like Hera, a Korean salon, or find a Japanese caterer.
In the corner, two bags full of books, including novels and magazines, were kept. These had been donated by expats who were leaving the country so the ones that were coming in could use them.
Takushi Arataki, 36, left Japan five years ago to be part of the growth that India promised.
He wanted to run a catering business for the Japanese community here. Five years ago, he came to India to learn Hindi. Now, he speaks fluent Hindi and has a successful business.
“I like it. But it is difficult too. We get cheated often,” he said. “But it is fun. We have a strong sense of community and we know most of the Japanese here.”
He is from Tokyo. When the earthquake hit, he saw the wreckage unfold on television. In Tokyo, his family was fine. The radiation hadn't reached there yet.
He believed in the Japanese resilience like others. They were going to bounce back. Such disaster were a way of life. Only this one was bigger. But no worries, he said.
In Tokyo, as tremors were felt, an Indian origin national Alok Parekh who wrote that as he was scrambling to call his family, he saw cafes open their doors to serve drinks and free bread to lighten up the mood.
“Having been born in Tokyo, I was somewhat accustomed to earthquakes. But I knew that the effects of this event would be catastrophic for the country. What I do know is that elevator conversations about 'last night's earthquake' will soon come to an end, Japan's taxpayers and corporations are rich enough to bear the cost of this tragedy, and the country will emerge stronger than ever once it starts rebuilding itself,” he said.
The same were echoed by the community here that got together to help out, and never let the world discount their courage. The calm Japanese in their country and elsewhere became the force to counter nature's fury. This was unlike anywhere – Haiti earthquake, Katrina floods.
The images of tragedy were a resilient people that worked silently against the tide, to turn it around.
And all of that was contained in the old Katsu, bent in prayer.